Image Credits: Dall-E
Harleen Bagga
Many students would likely cite the desire to learn as the primary reason for committing to four years of college. But what do we really mean when we use the word “learn”? It is something we do right from the moment we are born, so most of us take this complex process for granted. How many of us have spent time trying to understand the meaning of learning, or how it occurs? Although we have a general sense of how to learn, many assumptions are involved in this process. Teachers often think that because they are teaching, students must also be learning. Students assume that because they have read the text and memorized the facts, they must also have learned something. However, what these assumptions about learning lack is the role of innovation. In the above model, the learner does not actively process, innovate, and tinker with the learnings: all they do is passively memorize. The etymological understanding of the word “technology”, when introduced to the learning models practised in classrooms, will harness the students' individual learning styles and their creative growth. What I suggest is that the learning model should be such that the students craft their own learning, and the teacher helps them in doing so --- as in cooperative, innovative, and active learning techniques.
The word technology can be traced to two Greek words, transliterated into techne and logos. Techne means the art, skill, craft, or the way by which a thing is gained. Logos means a word or utterance that expresses thought. Technology is not just in gadgets and sophisticated machines; it can be broken down into the very essence of ‘crafting’ – something that returns the power to create to the hands of its user. The learner who embodies the essence of technology can benefit highly from this model of student-directed active learning, harbouring their individual growth.
Popular film has tried to address the question of innovative learning, giving the student control to craft their learning process. Naina, the revolutionary, innovative teacher in the comedy drama “Hichki” released in 2018, focussed on bringing up more innovation and understanding-based learning through self-experimentation and questioning. Her pedagogical techniques abandoned the traditional methods of rote learning and endless problem-solving. This film helped us understand that there are no bad students when it comes to learning; it all depends on how teachers instil good learning habits in their students. Now the question arises: Are there strategies we can implement to optimize the acquisition of knowledge among students?
A classic study by the National Training Board found that students retained only 5% of the information they received in lectures after twenty-four hours. Retention rates increased to 75-90% when active learning involving peer teaching was used instead of lectures. Other active learning methods (e.g., demonstration and discussion) also resulted in higher retention rates (30% and 50%, respectively). A commonly used approach for active learning is cooperative learning. An enormous amount of research confirms the effectiveness of cooperative learning. Compared with the more traditional individualized and competitive models of learning, students who tend to learn in cooperative groups exhibit markedly improved individual achievement, metacognitive thought, willingness to assume difficult tasks, persistence, motivation, and transfer of learning to new situations. Cooperative learning also improves relationships between students and faculty, and it generally improves self-esteem and attitude toward learning.
According to psychologist John Dunlosky, the traditional approaches that pupils have used to learn any subject, such as underlining and rereading the material, are fundamentally wrong. Instead, he emphasizes the necessity for retrieval practice to be more deliberate and effortful. Retrieval process involves the student individually crafting their own learning. A lot of people tend to think that the mind or human brain is like a video camera so you can rewind and replay faithfully the information you have accumulated, or the information is somehow limited so that people can store only a certain amount of information before they lose it to something else. Even today, some university classes are conducted in the old-fashioned “sage on the stage” format, where the professor stands in the front of the room and does nothing but lecture, filling the students' minds with what they already know while they spend their time taking notes and frantically trying to record the professor's every word, much like court stenographers. This passive approach to learning and absorbing knowledge, in Dunlosky's opinion, does not foster true learning. When we actively engage with the information and actively struggle to produce the content that has been consumed, real learning occurs. This practice helps us consolidate the information in memory, which allows us to learn far more than we would if we simply reread the material.
Students must be prepared to embrace what Robert A Bojork, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA, calls the “desirable difficulties” during learning. These challenges are useful or desirable since they improve long-term learning and application of that specific subject.
A large body of research indicates that people have different learning styles. A learning style is the student’s way of responding to and using stimuli in the context of learning. That is, people tend to focus on different types of information, operate on the information differently, and achieve understanding at different levels. Importantly, no single learning style is better or worse than the others. There is also the issue of multiple types of intelligence, as stated by Gardener.
The innovation in the current learning system should foster the development of active learning and consider individual learning styles and intelligence types. Pratham Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to delivering quality education to children from underprivileged backgrounds, has been working along these lines. They utilize technology with the help of ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) to diagnose pupils' reading and numeracy levels as well as to rate their musical aptitude and train their teachers to deliver content as per the individual child’s type of intelligence, and they have had measurable success.
It is thus necessary to train teachers to handle critical thinking and analytic modes of teaching. Teachers should encourage students to make deliberate efforts while engaging with the material. Moreover, there is a need to acknowledge that every child is intelligent in their own way. A child might not be intelligent with logical numbers but may be very sharp linguistically.
As learners, we need to take charge of our own ideas, inferences, and intellectual processes. If a learner’s learning relies purely on external assessment, then they are not thinking critically or engaging their metacognitive skills. As learners, we must be comfortable with the discomfort that accompanies learning something new, because these discomforts are the “desirable difficulties” that help us get a strong hold over the subject.
As a parent or a teacher, you should encourage your child's curiosity, let them learn beyond the realms of the classroom, and encourage them to explore beyond the rigidity of the school curriculum. Real learning happens when students feel they have agency in their learning process. The learning choices that we let students make in school/college may result in habits that affect the rest of their lives. If they craft their own learning and embody the very meaning of technology, they learn better, they learn for a lifetime.
Harleen Bagga, Staff at Plaksha University. Views expressed in this article are personal and do not reflect that of the University.